Thread: 3.1 MSQ Reaction [SPOILERS]

Originally Posted by CyrilLucifer

From the newest interview:
Yoshida: Speaking of "the void," what's on the other side in another world was also a theme back in FFXI. As things progress and you find out the true purpose of the Warriors of Darkness, you'll start to see connections with elements surrounding the void, so things should get interesting.

Preeeeeetty sure he's going to go WotG on us, as many of us expected.

Isn't that the "depressing" xpac of XI (wouldn't know, haven't played the game enough to know its story)?

Yep, basically. Probably the most depressing FFXI expansion, but everyone knew going into it that it would be at least partially morbid for reasons I'm not going to bother explaining to someone not interested in XI's lore because it would take a rather large post.

tl;dr version of Wings of the Goddess that Yoshi is referring to:

It starts off with Atomos appearing in your world and sucking you into the past to the Great War against the Shadowlord, which wasn't too far before the events of normal XI. A bit longer than the time skip from 1.0 to 2.0 in XIV, but it had a similar effect on the game's lore.

You meet another girl from the present there and work with her to discern why you're there. Eventually, she starts fading from existence and people stop remembering her entirely, as if she never existed.

More things happen. Odin is involved, like he is in almost everything in FFXI. He's a much more powerful figure in XI, ruling the underworld and everything in it. The introduction of Hades made his role slightly more unclear when it comes to what he controls, but I won't bother getting into it, since that's a different expansion. tl;dr of the Odin tl;dr: Void, void, void, void.

Eventually it's revealed that the FFXI world you've been playing in the entire time is a "fake" world, created by the Goddess Altana because she did not like how the Great War ended. But this fake world is encroaching on the true world, and that's messing everything up. So Atomos, the Devourer of Time, is trying to completely devour your world to fix the "error" of your emotional, rather short-sighted but well-intentioned Goddess, which is collapsing all of existence.

In the true FFXI world (not yours), the girl you're with has a pact with Odin and you're her favored servant as a Spitewarden. Which basically puts you at the very top of the food chain, too. The most relevant comparison in XIV would be an Ascian, since the Spitewardens have control over Demons, many of which are voidsent in XIV, such as Imps and Shadowdragons - the AK NM final boss or that dragon in the recent FFXI event FATE.

You don't fix things, not really.

You satisfy Atomos by sending one anomaly (the girl you're with who is a demoness in the true world) to the other world to replace the demoness. Everyone forgets about her and it's as if she never existed in everyone's memory but yours. Also, your world still is the fake one and Atomos is still there, a looming shadow but no longer a direct threat.

Originally Posted by Rocl

There's about four alternate dimension storylines I can think of in XI and I believe the most recent one was the finale (which had direct ties to the Void I've heard). Wings of the Goddess is the first in that list, but there's still other "options."

Abyssea, WotG, Rhapsodies, and which? Dynamis? I'm not entirely sure I'd consider Dynamis something he's referring to there, it's not an alternate dimension in the same way. It would fit Morningstar's "Primal world" though.

I personally see Abyssea basically doing exactly the same thing to the story of XIV as WotG would, which is changing history at one point for the worse due to things that did or didn't happen. This one has equally interesting implications, because it deals with Promathia's change, not Altana's.

Rhapsodies is a change in the future, yes?

Actually, all of the alternate FFXI worlds are depressing, what the hell.

Originally Posted by CyrilLucifer

Abyssea, WotG, Rhapsodies, and which? Dynamis? I'm not entirely sure I'd consider Dynamis something he's referring to there, it's not an alternate dimension in the same way. It would fit Morningstar's "Primal world" though.

I personally see Abyssea basically doing exactly the same thing to the story of XIV as WotG would, which is changing history at one point for the worse due to things that did or didn't happen. This one has equally interesting implications, because it deals with Promathia's change, not Altana's.

Rhapsodies is a change in the future, yes?

Actually, all of the alternate FFXI worlds are depressing, what the hell.

Every timeline but "the main reality" is royally screwed. The fourth in question was the Voidwalker/Provenance storyline where we end up in a world where the Mothercrystal never shattered or something. (And I have a whole lot of reservations about a lot of the XI-Alternates with the way their pantheon is structured.)

Dynamis was a side-pocket of "the main reality" maybe? Again, the way their pantheon is set up in XI is needlessly confusing to me, lol.

I think it's worth mentioning that once Exdeath made it known that his objective was restoring the world to its original form, Bartz's immediate knee-jerk assumption is that it is a world of evil.

(Classic Bartz: he's completely wrong. Sorta. The evil plan comes into effect after the worlds are merged.)

Which is, as always, not to say that this is what must happen here, just that there's an in-series precedent for this sort of misunderstanding.

Originally Posted by Belhi

So where exactly would Zodiark fit into all of that though?

Well, if you're referring to the XI bits from the interview, I'd say Promathia is the closest analogue we have at the moment given we saw him as a giant Dark Crystal similar to Hydaelyn.

In XI, Promathia, God of Twilight is - and these are kinda big CoP spoilers, so I'm going to spoiler them, even though it's like 12 years old:

1. The father of all of the mortal races.
2. Killed/Banished/Chained before creation.
3. The counterpart to Altana, the Dawn Goddess. They seemed to be lovers, as implied by Dawn.
3.5. As with WotG, Altana did something rather foolish in a desperate bid to ensure his continued existence. She spread his essence throughout the mortals. In doing so, she destroyed the singular mothercrystal and it split up into to 5 we have in modern XI.
4. Promathia did create an Emptiness, the purpose of which was the return of all things to death in Apocalypse. He sought to reunite all of himself that Altana split, the parts of mortals, more than out of actual hate.

Here's the lore summary, right from the very last cutscene of CoP, it basically just says the above, but it's in-game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8H_REHvISc

Despite having control of XIV's Voidspawn equivalent in XI, I'd definitely say Odin is not an analogue.

Since Yoshi's XI comment was related to it having alternate worlds and possibly being used in a XIV context similarly, Promathia's related to three of the four we know of in XI:
The lack of 3.5 from my spoilers above happening at all because 2 didn't happen, which basically didn't lead to creation. This is the last one Rocl mentioned that I forgot about - Provenance.
Us failing to defeat him and stop the spread of his Emptiness, which sent the world into a cataclysm in Abyssea when he mutated into Shinryu.
Something to do with Iroha's future world as well, since that has to do with Emptiness, but I haven't played the last Rhapsodies chapter.

This all being said, I don't think they're going to be drawing directly from XI. I think Yoshi's just saying we're going to be using similar thematic elements, such as in WotG familiar characters being antagonists in the other world due to differing circumstances, a failure of one event to occur changing everything, or something equivalent to Altana's emotional response that ended up almost destroying everything (also used in XIII, by the way), but also leading to all of creation.